Going with the smaller guys, sometimes you lose out

My backup solution for years consisted of storing the media on a large hard drive and backing it up on DVD’s. That all changed in 2006, when I found some spare time away from work, I set up a small RAID 1 (mirroring) solution using Debian.

I’m not one to love the idea of having six computers in my home office and updating them, validating nothing broke each week or month. It becomes a task similar to doing bills over time. My other major concern is, what happens if something did happen to me? How is my non-technical wife going to manage technical affairs?

So, while I decided my mirror RAID was sufficient, I didn’t think it would be large enough to last me through all of 2007. I did what any geek would do and ordered larger drives. However, this time I slowly begin convincing myself that I should take a look at the wife issue as well. I looked into several off the shelf and free RAID solutions with colleagues.

Set your alternative

On a KUbuntu desktop, I noticed that while viewing a config file using less, I wanted to edit (v key) the config file now. Oops…whats nano doing there? I expected vim!

Easy change….

sudo update-alternatives –config editor

For me, I selected option #4.

Done…hope this was helpful to anyone else out there. Want to see all of the alternatives? List them out in /etc/alternatives:

ls -l /etc/alternatives/

Joel on Bribing Bloggers

Very rarely do I like to post an entry in my blog to piggy back off another blogger. Often I will leave comments. But I feel so strongly on this, and comments were out of the question…so on with it!

Joel writes here (Bribing Bloggers), and I have to admit. I was nervous when I read the first part of his article. I have been a Joel On Software reader for quite a long time. In the end I was pleased to know that Joel has not compromised his qualities and passion for doing what he feels is the right thing to do.

KUbuntu and NVIDIA

What is wrong with this picture?

mark@kubuntu:~$ cat /proc/driver/nvidia/agp/card
Fast Writes: Supported
SBA: Not Supported
AGP Rates: 4x 2x 1x
Registers: 0x1f000017:0x1b000104
mark@kubuntu:~$ cat /proc/driver/nvidia/agp/host-bridge
Host Bridge: PCI device 10b9:1647
Fast Writes: Not Supported
SBA: Supported
AGP Rates: 4x 2x 1x
Registers: 0x1b000207:0x00000104

Only took a moment to finally determine why both Fast Writes and SBA were not working properly.

F-35 First Flight

The F-35 Lightning II Stealth Fighter flew its very first flight today out of Fort Worth, Texas. Originally planned for the late morning, delays due to fog kept the fighter grounded until the FAA cleared the beast in the afternoon. The flight lasted 35 minutes, and a few lucky people were fortunate to watch it on a webcast this afternoon.

Read more about it here.